Emulating a marching band with wearable instruments

[Scott] is a design and technology master’s student who just came up with The Imaginary Marching Band – virtual band instruments you can wear on your hand.

Taking inspiration from Minority Report and the NES Power Glove, the system is able to emulate 6 instruments at this point – A trumpet, trombone, tuba, snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals. The glove itself reads data from a variety of sensors and passes that onto an Arduino Uno which sends serial data back to a computer. This data is then parsed by a Serial – MIDI converter, and can then be played back through a sampler, synthesizer or piped into your sequencer of choice. Happily, [Scott] will be designing custom PCBs for his gloves to cut down on space and weight, and he’ll also be making his project open-source eventually.

[Scott] has a kickstarter page for his project, and so far he’s been on track towards getting this project funded. Check out a demo after the break.

“CURRENTLY DIY VIDEOS, SOURCE CODE, AND CIRCUIT DRAWINGS ARE ONLY AVAILABLE TO KICKSTARTER CONTRIBUTORS. EITHER CONTRIBUTE TO THE CAUSE OR CHECK BACK IN JULY WHEN THE PROJECT WILL BECOME OPEN TO EVERYONE.”

This would be perfect for Teensy, not only due to the much smaller size and lower cost, but because Teensy can be a real USB MIDI device, programmed right from the Arduino IDE. (full disclosure, I’m involved with the Teensy development, so this isn’t an unbiased opinion)

Hey all, thanks for the comments. The other reason I used the Uno over the lilypad is that I’m hoping to use it’s native ability to run as a USB device, making the gloves a lot easier to use.

Great call on the Teensy, Paul, that looks incredible and like it could totally fulfill our needs as far as USB goes. Would love to talk more.

Sorry for not putting the DIYs up online right away but this stuff costs so much money and I am so broke and really need the dough to keep working on this. it’s also a cover for my mfa class that i honestly haven’t finished them ;)

i’ll definitely be putting up source code on my site for everyone to see as soon as I get a chance to clean it up, just saving the snazzy (and i repeat yet to be produced) videos for the k’starter in the short term. i will however be putting them up completely for free and for all uses when I do later in the summer, so I hope you’ll excuse my two months of only-kinda-sorta-barely-capitalism! If you are interested in seeing the project progress I’d really appreciate even a tiny donation, and promise to support any kickstarter projects you’re working on!